Just another happy rag by one of them broads.

Strawberry Jam and Toast.

Well, I’m back to my old normal self again. It is very early in the morning and I am wide awake after having gone to bed at 9 pm last night. Actually, I woke up at three o’clock and sat and read some other blogs first to get in the proper writing mood. I was laying in bed first, trying to guess what time it was and I guessed it was about five o’clock, because that is how wide awake I felt, but I waited for awhile before I got up, just to make sure I was all done sleeping. Having reassured myself of that, I got up and when I got to the living room, it turned out I was wrong about the time, but I didn’t despair and made a pot of coffee and a cup of Senseo. Always keep seeing the bright side of life! Isn’t that a line in a song?

I remember eating toast before I went to sleep last night, I do have some memory of that. I also had a glass of milk, but I only have a vague memory of drinking that and I think I may not have finished it, because this morning there is milk in the cats’ dishes and I think that is my milk that Eduard has poured in them. I wonder in what kind of state Eduard found me when he got home last night. Sitting up in bed with my book in my lap and my reading glasses halfway down my nose? I have no memory of falling asleep.

My Maasdammer cheese is all gone and so are the raisin crackers, so I was looking for things to eat last night and I ate some slices of dead cow. Or dead pig, whatever it had originally been. At the time it tasted good, but I regretted it afterwards, as it was a purely impulsive thing to do and I didn’t want to eat that especially, I just wanted a quick snack. I apologized to the God of Dead Animals and promised not to do it again. It is very hypocritical to eat dead animals after you have vowed not to, even if it is only a few slices. You don’t know what that animal had to go through in order to end up in that package like that, after all.

Well, not to get too morbid, there was the toaster and some lovely wheat bread and I had enough sense to make toast and eat that and satisfy the rest of my cravings. It is much easier to eat toast then it is to eat fresh bread, as I can chew it a lot better and it doesn’t get stuck in my gastric band like fresh bread does. I had strawberry jam on it and that was just lovely. I have several jars of jam in the refrigerator that have all been opened and that all need to be used up before we can open the jar of plum jam that Eduard’s office manager has made and should be very good. Homemade jam is always so much better than factory jam. I like jam that is not too sweet and makes your mouth pucker just a bit.

I watched a good movie called Paradise Now, about a Palestinian suicide terrorist and the day leading up to his deed and his struggle with his conscious about what he is about to do. It was not at all a movie about a fanatic Muslim bent on revenge, but about a young man who thought there was no other course of action open to him, while other people tried to tell him that maybe there was. It’s the kind of movie that makes you think about issues and about how little you know about the other side. How we are influenced by news items and about how little we know about what happens in the occupied territories. How little we know about Palestinian people. By which I don’t mean that I condone suicide terrorists, of course. There just are two sides to the story that need equal opportunity to be heard.

After that I watched a horror film called Fragile and that sure puts you in a different mood. Actually, I did other things while I watched it, such as make cigarettes and make coffee and talk to Eduard. It didn’t capture me that much, because the Palestinian film had and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. A horror film seems sort of trivial after that. It wasn’t scary enough to really bother me and that is saying a lot, because I do have quite an imagination when it comes to these things. I can scare myself to bits just watching anything horrific. But then again, real life is horrific, you don’t need horror films to be horrified. I always wonder why people need to be scared by the supernatural when real life can be so scary and terrifying. I speak as a witness to this and I have never been witness to anything supernatural.

Our cat Gandhi is turning into a round little porker. She likes her food very much, but she is getting the same amount as the other two cats. It is funny to watch her walk with her slightly round stomach. She is still very graceful, but she looks like a slightly overweight ballet dancer. I’ll have to keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t gain too much weight. Pleasantly plump is okay, morbidly obese is another thing altogether. I know of what I speak. I would say that I have not yet reached the pleasantly plump stage myself.

Toby is just getting bigger all around. If he were human, you would say he is developing muscles. He is a big boy cat. He needs to be tough, he needs to defend his territory, which is extra hard when you have been so unkindly castrated by your owners. Well, by the vet, of course. God forbid we should have done that ourselves in the kitchen with the potato peeling knife.

Nouri is just as small and delicate as ever. She is our little princess and she will never quite grow up. To us she will always be a kitten. She could wear a tutu and be the lead dancer in a performance of Swan Lake. I can picture it now, sort of a magical Alice in Wonderland performance. I always thought Alice in Wonderland was a scary book, especially when the Queen started shouting: “Off with their heads.” I didn’t like how irrational all the characters behaved in the book and I thought it was all just awfully scary. Later on I heard that other children had this reaction also and that the book’s author may have been influenced by drugs, although that may have been a legend also. I am sure my English readers will know more about that.

A book I really liked when I was a child, was a fat book of collected fairy tales with woodcut prints. The woodcut prints were especially good and didn’t leave much to the imagination. There was one of the Flying Dutchman that was especially good. The ship had torn sails that were blowing in the storm and there were lots of ominous looking clouds. I was about eight years old when I had that book and I have no idea what happened to it. I remember sitting at the dining room table and just being absolutely fascinated by it. I do thank my mother for always making sure that we had lots of books to read and making us members of the library as soon as possible. And for subscribing to a weekly women’s magazine in which I could prematurely read the Adventures of Angelique, written by Anne and Serge Golon, every week with much interest, as I thought it was all very sexy and romantic.

My mother had a lot of books by American authors and I remember trying to read these when I was still quite young, because I was always starved for reading material. Most of these books were too difficult for me to understand, but I remember that there were passages that made quite an impression on me and that some books had photographs in them because films had been made of them. The Young Lions by Leon Uris and The Streets of Chicago of which I don’t remember the author. I also read West Side Story and Peyton Place. I was fascinated by these books and could look at the photographs for hours. Mostly I tried to figure out why the grownups in them behaved the way they did and if they did because they were American and alien to us Dutch people. They were definitely more interesting and worldly. These books, along with American movies, shaped my view of all things American and by the time I was seventeen, I thought I knew what America was all about. I didn’t actively go around thinking about it, but subconsciously I thought Americans were a more evolved species of human being. That they were in all things bigger a
nd better than us.

Well, here I am now, a Dutch woman again in my country of birth and a lot wiser than that seventeen year old and I know that life is not that simple and that people are not that easily qualified. I think my first years in America busted every notion that I had then and left me very disillusioned. It is because I came to have good friends that my idea of what Americans were all about changed for the better and I came to understand them as human beings like every body else. I would have been a very bitter and disappointed woman otherwise.

I did learn to like to live there, I did become an American to some extent. Albeit a green card carrying one, because I never could give up my Dutch citizenship. Did you know that, when you become an American citizen, you can completely change your name? So if you don’t like any of the names you were given as a baby, you can just change them completely and take on a whole new identity. I seriously considered doing this, as I always liked the name Norah. My friends wanted me to become an American citizen and give a party for me. I filled in all of the paperwork, but in the end I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t stop being Dutch, regardless of the name change.

Now I am glad that I still have my Dutch passport, it made coming back a lot easier. It will make it easier for my daughter to some day have her Dutch passport. We are waiting for the Dutch government to adopt a law about this. They are just dragging their feet on this a bit, because their is a big to do about people from especially Muslim countries having a double nationality and that they ought to choose one or the other. It has to do with nationalism and the fear of radicalism. There are extreme right members of parliament who create these sort of problems.

Anyway, you start talking about one thing and end up some place else all together. It all started with books and how much I like to read them and always have. I think I like to read English language books also, because they expose me to more other cultures, albeit that most of those are western ones, but they are all slightly different from my own. I very much like the South African ones, because they shed a lot of light on the situation there. I like the English ones, because they are always making cups of tea with sugar in them for whatever calamity hits them. Maybe I would like a Dutch book if it were written in English!

I started reading BergdorfBlondes and it is a sassy book about sassy rich women. It is all very tongue in cheek and you can’t take any of it seriously. I don’t know yet if I like it, because I keep falling asleep with it. I don’t know if I like for every page to be humorous. It may be time to go back to the reading lists and do some serious reading again after these tentative steps into Dutch literature and chick lit. I do know what I like, after all. It would be nice if I could read in French and German like Eduard does, but I am afraid that I am not good enough in those languages anymore to do that. Papa fumes une pipe. Voici ma soeur Alice. That’s about it.

Okay folks, it’s time to hang up. I’ve got to read some news and make a new pot of coffee and you know what that means. Yes, I also get a cup of Senseo. Oh, thanks Laura, for sending me the make your own coffee pad link. I’ll have to look into that and see if it is as good as the regular coffee pads which make a creamy and full bodied coffee, spoken like a real advertisement!

Have a great day, ciao…

P.S. Strawberry jam and toast makes me think of jam and cream and scones, which we had for tea in the fair town of Victoria on Vancouver Island. That tasted so good and I think having tea like that is a very good habit and one we should all adopt. I wish someone would open a tea shop in this town, but then again, it is possible to order tea and delicious pastry here also. But what about watercress sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches? Nah, I don’t want to eat those anyway. I just want the fattening sweet stuff. Can anyone tell me what clotted cream is? Is that cream with clots in it? And what are clots?

5 Responses

Alice in Wonderland is a bit weird, very Freudian with all those bits about people getting stuck in rabbit holes etc. Lewis Carroll was a repressed Oxford mathematics don who liked the company of young girls, though not in a sinister way. There is also a Victorian English writer called Edward Lear who writes in a similar way, so it must be something about being repressed and English!

Clotted cream is coagulated cream. When we went to Devon we had a Devonshire cream tea which is scone, jam and cream. A delightful experience!

I knew an English person would set me straight on Alice in Wonderland. I think Victorian men as a whole were repressed quite a bit, weren’t they? They weren’t allowed to have lusty thoughts about women.

Devonshire cream tea sounds like my kind of tea. I do need to go over there and have some before my gastric band disallows it! But then again, even three bites of it sounds good. lol

yep – they clot cream by heating it very gently so that you end up with a very very thick cream with a sort of yellow buttery crust on the top. It is deeeelicious – nothing better with homemade scones and jam – yum.We also use ‘clot’ to mean ‘idiot’ or ‘clumsy person’ – not sure why – but it is a very mild way of expressing anger to say ‘You’re a clot’ I think it is pretty old-fashioned now as people prefer to use more extreme language for every occasion. LOL